Data Compression

Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will take substantially less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have ample power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they take a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.